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Just two decades ago ...

Only 30 percent of Americans used computers and only 15 percent of households owned personal computers.

Computing power was conglomerated in a few select supercomputing centers at major research institutions and national labs.

The fastest supercomputer in the world, a CM-3, could perform 14 billion floating-point operations per second (flops) or 14 gigaflops.

The world was only able to store 16 million terabytes or 16 exabytes of data in total.

The World Wide Web just opened to the public, featured only a handful of web pages that described the project itself.

Today ...

Over 75 percent of all Americans use the Internet. Some 44 percent of them own smartphones; 56 percent of people who bought a new phone in the last 3 months chose a smartphone.

The current iPhone has 60 times more processing power and 1/500th the size of Macintosh's first commercially available computer under $1,000, the Macintosh Classic.

The fastest supercomputer on earth clocks at more than 10 thousand trillion flops or 10 petaflops.

Global Internet traffic is estimated at over 21 million terabytes or 21 exabytes/month and the indexed World Wide Web contains over 8 billion pages.

Join us in describing and discussing these and other profound changes, the myriad of breakthroughs that enabled them, and the "big ideas" that will shape our future at a symposium marking two decades of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. NITRD, established by the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991, is the coordinated, multi-agency computer science research and development program.

Under this umbrella, 15 partner agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Energy and National Institutes of Health have sponsored the fundamental research that has changed the world.

With a keynote address by former Vice President Al Gore, and talks on advances and prospects in networking and information technology research and development--from how it touches people on a daily basis to the advances in other areas of science and engineering that it is enabling--and discussion of the profound impact of this work on our nation's competitiveness, this symposium promises to be high profile and chock-full of information.

What:

The Impact of NITRD: Two Decades of Game-Changing Breakthroughs in Networking and Information Technology--Expanding Possibilities Ahead. See full agenda.

Reporters may also attend this invitation-only symposium from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. in order to watch the "Future Big Ideas" panel, as well as attend the reception, visit the agency showcase, and interview participants.

The Future "Big Ideas" Panel from 4:30 to 5:15 p.m., on the 7th floor of the Newseum's Knight Conference Center, will feature Tom Kalil, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (moderator); Peter Lee, Microsoft Research; Elizabeth Mynatt, Georgia Institute of Technology; Stefan Savage, University of California, San Diego; and Charles Vest, National Academy of Engineering.

The Reception & Agency Showcase from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. on the 8th floor of the Newseum's Knight Conference Center, will spotlight each NITRD agency's research accomplishments and prospects for the future via flyers, posters and demos.

RSVP: Please RSVP to Lisa-Joy Zgorski, lisajoy@nsf.gov, to attend the portions of the program open to reporters.

The full list of NITRD agency partners follows:

Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD/DoD) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2019, its budget is $8.1 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives more than 50,000 competitive proposals for funding and makes about 12,000 new funding awards.